


i remember running with you through the streets

by bayloriffic



Category: Lost
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-23
Updated: 2011-09-23
Packaged: 2017-10-23 23:40:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bayloriffic/pseuds/bayloriffic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The bullet just grazed his arm, no major damage done, and he manages to talk his way out of going to the hospital, just gets bandaged up in the back of the ambulance. Juliet sits next to him on the bumper, close enough so that their sides are touching, and she’s fine, she keeps telling him, she’s fine, but her hands keep shaking and she won't look him in the eye.</p><p>Sideways!Verse, goes AU after "Recon" (6.08)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i remember running with you through the streets

  
**  
   
   
As soon as a spot opens up in Homicide, Miles puts in for a transfer.  
   
James doesn't take it personal—he knows Miles has wanted to be where the bodies are for his whole career—but, still. It’s gonna be a pain in the ass to break in a new partner.  
   
Once Miles leaves, James spends most of his time working alone on the Cooper case, which suits him just fine.  
   
It takes three weeks before a new detective transfers over to Vice. Juliet Burke. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Looks likes she’s never fired a gun in her entire goddamn life.  
   
Shit. He can’t fucking believe Miles ditched him.  
   
   
**  
   
   
Juliet’s just about the quietest cop he’s ever been around. She doesn’t sigh or breathe heavy or tap her pen when she’s filling out paperwork or rustle the files at her desk.  
   
When Miles stops by the squad room to check out his replacement, he tells James he’s impressed. He also makes sure to mention that Juliet’s hot, like that's supposed to makes James feel better somehow.  
   
It doesn't. He still finds her whole creepy-calm thing damn unsettling and he ain’t sure how long he’s going to be able to take it. No matter how hot she is.  
   
   
**  
   
   
Two days after they get partnered, James thinks he’s caught a break in the Cooper investigation through an old cold case.  
   
He’s on his way out the door when Juliet stops him and asks him what’s up. He’d rather work this alone, but she’s here and she’s his partner, so. He gives her the basics as she follows him down the hall and to the motor pool to pick up a car. He doesn't tell her about Sawyer or anything, just that Cooper's a grifter. The whole time, she doesn’t ask him a single question, just watches him carefully with her unnervingly blue eyes.  
   
He hopes that ain't a bad sign.  
   
   
**  
   
   
She reads the Cooper file on the way to his house, her face blank and serene, not giving anything away.  When she’s done, she closes the file and sits quietly, looking straight ahead as they drive through the streets of Beverly Hills.  
   
It seems Cooper’s been living the good life off all the money he’s stolen over the past thirty years, while James spent most of his childhood in a run-down trailer park in Alabama and now lives in a shitty apartment off La Cienega, and the whole fucking thing just makes him sick.  
   
And Juliet’s silence ain’t exactly making him feel any better, so he finally looks over at her and says, “So?”  
   
“So,” she says back to him, and turns her head so she’s finally looking his way. She doesn’t say anything else, though, and he’s starting to get a little pissed. He ain’t sure that he can take how fucking annoying she is with her not talking and blank stares right now.  
   
“So,” he repeats, and brakes for a red light. “What the hell do you think?”  
   
“About Cooper?”  
   
“No, about the goddamn Kennedy assassination,” he snaps. “Yeah, about Cooper.”  
   
She turns her head so she’s staring out the passenger side window and shrugs. “I’m not sure,” she says. “Seems like a pretty weak connection.”  
   
James just stares at the back of her head, at her ridiculously shiny blonde hair, and he really misses Miles, the annoying little bastard. Misses the arguments and the insults and the telling him he’s an idiot, that’s he’s too close to the case, that he takes things too personal. He doesn’t want this new partner with her perfect hair and her bright blue eyes and her quiet stares.  
   
He’s still staring at her when the car behind him honks. When he looks up, the light’s turned green and he reaches over and snatches the folder out of her lap, jamming his foot down on the accelerator, the tires squealing on the asphalt.  
   
“Yeah, well,” he says, and turns into Cooper’s long, winding driveway. “Just keep your mouth shut and follow my lead.”  
   
   
**  
   
   
The interview is a goddamn disaster. Cooper’s polite and pleasant and the son of a bitch is lying, James is one-hundred-percent sure, but in the end they got nothing on him. Nothing but James’s thirty-year-old memories and what turned out to be a weak-ass connection to a case that went cold ten years ago.  
   
They walk out of the house, and he slams his fist against the hood of the car. “Son of a bitch!” he yells, and kicks one of the tires.  
   
He’s on the verge of putting his fist through the passenger side window when Juliet grabs hold of his arm.  
   
“James,” she says softly. “Stop."  
   
And maybe he should be annoyed because it ain’t like she helped him out in there, but for some crazy reason it actually calms him down. Makes him feel a little bit less like things are spinning out of control.  
   
   
**  
   
   
Two weeks later, they’re sitting in an unmarked car outside a run-down warehouse in East LA, staking out a suspect.  
   
Six hours in stuck in a car together and he’s got a feeling he’s gonna have Detective Burke pretty much figured out by the time their shift’s over.  
   
He starts out easy, asks about her family. She’s got a sister and a nephew who live in Miami, she’s been married just the once, and her parents both died when she was in college—her dad in a car crash, her mom of cancer.  
   
She answers all his questions patiently and doesn’t ask him anything in response, like she knows he’s testing her. It’s a little unsettling, truth be told, but he just moves forward, determined to figure her out.  
   
“So why’d you want to be a cop?” he asks.  
   
“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “I guess I just wanted to help people.”  
   
He rolls his eyes because that’s just about the most cliché thing she could have said. Maybe it won’t take all six hours to figure her out after all.  
   
“How about you?” she asks.  
   
James looks away, focuses on the warehouse their suspect’s supposed to be hiding out in. “Long story,” he says.  
   
“Well, we’ve got plenty of time,” she says and smiles in a way that makes him think that maybe she knows.  
   
He doesn’t answer and she doesn’t ask anything else.  
   
   
**  
   
   
“So,” he asks after exactly sixteen minutes of complete and utter silence. “What made you choose vice?”  
   
She looks at him steadily and he thinks for a minute that she’s going to tell him to fuck off, but she just shrugs. “It was the only department with an opening,” she says and, hell, at least she’s honest.  
   
They lapse into silence again after that. And, damn, he wishes she’d say something. There’s no way in hell he’s gonna break first again.  
   
   
**  
   
   
Forty-two minutes later she looks at him out of the corner of her eye and says, “Can I ask you something, James?”  
   
“Sure thing, Blondie,” he says and grins at her. “What do you wanna know?”  
   
“Why’d you become a cop?” she asks him again and, shit, he thought they were past this.  
   
“Why the hell does it matter?” he says.  
   
“Because you won’t tell me,” she says. “Normally you don’t shut up. There’s got to be a reason for that.”  
   
“Yeah, well,” he says. “It ain’t important.”  
   
“James,” she says quietly. “Tell me.”  
   
He looks over at her and, what the hell, he’s gonna have to tell her sometime.  
   
“My parents died when I was a kid,” he says and looks back at the warehouse. “Conman took my folks for all they were worth. My daddy didn’t take it too well. He shot my mom then turned the gun on himself. I was hidin’ under my bed. Saw the whole thing.”  
   
“Cooper,” she says. It’s not a question.  
   
“Yeah,” he sighs and rubs a hand across his face. “Life’s fuckin’ funny sometimes, ain’t it?”  
   
“James,” she says, but then the warehouse door opens and their suspect’s standing there and he's out of the car before she can say anything else.  
   
   
**  
   
   
They chase the suspect down an alley, and James gets there just a few seconds before Juliet. The guy’s got a gun and he’s pointing it straight at James, and goddamn, he’s just a kid. Probably not more than fifteen years old.  
   
James is yelling at him to put down the gun, to get down on the ground, and he can hear Juliet’s footsteps pounding closer and closer, and he sees the kid flinch and then he feels a burning pain slice through his upper arm, feels it before he even hears the shot. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Juliet raise her gun and hears another shot, sees the kid fall, red blooming across his chest, and James closes his eyes because everything’s gone to hell.  
   
   
**  
   
   
James gets lucky. The bullet just grazed his arm, no major damage done, and he manages to talk his way out of going to the hospital, just gets bandaged up in the back of the ambulance. Juliet sits next to him on the bumper, close enough so that their sides are touching, and she’s fine, she keeps telling him, she’s fine, but her hands keep shaking and she won’t look him in the eye.  
   
When their captain comes over to get their report, Juliet sits there mostly silent while James answers the questions. They have to hand over their guns and they’ve both got meetings with IAB tomorrow, but for now they’re free to go.  
   
James walks Juliet to her car and her hands are bloody from where she held them against his arm while they waited for everyone to arrive. She keeps wiping them on her jeans like that’ll help. All it’s doing is getting streaks of red all over the denim and making him nervous as hell.  
   
After a few minutes he reaches out and puts his hand on top of hers and she finally, finally stops.  
   
   
**  
   
   
He gets a ride home with one of the uniforms from the scene, some guy he doesn’t know, and the whole way there he can’t stop thinking about the look on the kid’s face, the look on Juliet’s face, the blood all over her hands, and goddamn, he needs a fucking drink.  
   
   
**  
   
   
When he gets to his apartment, he takes four aspirin and chugs a beer before he strips off all his clothes and heads for the shower. He turns the water up as hot as he can stand and stays under the spray until it gets cold, careful to keep his bandaged arm dry.  
   
By the time he gets out and has another beer, the pain in his arm is just a dull throb.  
   
He thinks about calling Juliet, but he doesn't want to bother her, so he just watches TV instead. He picks up the remote and starts flipping through channels until he ends up on a rerun of one of those crime shows, the kind where the forensics people do all the work. And even though it’s total trash—biologists and chemists interviewing witnesses and arresting suspects, for fuck’s sake—he sits through the whole damn thing. By the time the show’s over, it’s one o’clock in the morning and he’s worked his way through the rest of the six-pack.  
   
He still feels kind of jittery from earlier, all the adrenaline and panic still pulsing through him. Too bad there ain’t much he can do about it right now. He wonders if Juliet’s feeling like this, too. Like she wants to crawl out of her skin. He thinks about the look on her face when he walked her to the car, the way her hands were shaking the whole time, and he thinks maybe she is.  
   
He grabs some more beer out of the fridge and his keys from the coffee table and heads for the door.  
   
He’s halfway to Juliet’s place before he even thinks about calling her, but it’s too late by then anyway. It ain’t like he’s going to turn around now. So he just presses down on the gas and heads to the address that he copied from her personnel file.  
   
   
**  
   
   
Juliet’s building is pretty damn nice. One of those high-rises all the way out in Marina del Rey, right on the coast, the kind that probably costs more than he’ll make in the next twenty years. She’s mentioned her doctor ex-husband once or twice, so he figures that probably explains it. She sure as hell ain’t living here on a cop’s salary.  
   
In the elevator, he gets vaguely nervous about showing up so late and thinks again about calling her. Hell, it’s almost two in the morning, she’s probably not even awake. But when he gets to her apartment, he can hear music coming from inside and she answers the door about five seconds after he knocks.  
   
“Hey,” he says when she opens the door. She’s wearing a pair of sweats and a tank top and her hair’s pulled up into a messy ponytail. She looks a lot different than when she’s at work. Softer, somehow.  
   
“Hi,” she says, and blinks at him.  
   
“Mind if I come in?” he asks, giving her a quick once over and smirking.  
   
“Uh,” she looks at the six-pack in his hand and then down at her thin white tank top and crosses her arms over her chest. “Sure.”  
   
She opens the door a little wider and he follows her inside, pulling the door shut behind him. Her apartment’s even nicer than he expected, like something out of a design catalog—big comfortable furniture, lots of framed pictures on the walls, and giant windows looking right out on the ocean. It also smells so strongly of bleach and cleaning products it’s making him feel a little sick to his stomach.  
   
“I ain’t interruptin’ anything am I?” he asks as she walks over to turn the volume down on the stereo a little.  
   
“No,” she says smiling at him. “Just doing some cleaning.”  
   
Saying “No shit” seems a little rude, even for him, so he just nods. He takes off his jacket, throws it across the back of one the dining room chairs and sets the beer down on her extraordinarily clean coffee table. “Nice place.”  
   
“Thanks,” she replies, picking up the beer and swiping at the condensation rings with her hand. She hands him two of the cans and brings the rest into the kitchen. “How’d you know where I live?” she calls to him over her shoulder.  
   
“I read your file,” he calls back, sitting on her couch and making himself at home.  
   
“Of course,” she says as she walks back into the room, but she doesn’t sound annoyed. Just a little tired, maybe.  
   
She sits next to him on the couch, her arm brushing lightly against his, and neither one of them says anything for a while. The music’s still playing softly in the background, a song from the ‘70s that he vaguely recognizes. He taps his fingers on his knee and drinks his beer and finally Juliet looks over at him and says, “What are you doing here, James?”  
   
This time she does sound kind of annoyed and he wonders if maybe it was a mistake, coming here.  
   
“I just,” he stops and runs a hand through his hair. “I just wanted to see how you were holdin’ up.”  
   
“As well as can be expected,” she answers and he can hear how hard she’s working to keep her voice steady, to make sure it doesn’t crack at all. “I mean, considering I shot and killed a kid.”  
   
He watches her carefully, trying to figure out what to do. There’s still some dried blood under her fingernails and her eyes are kind of bright and glassy. He hopes like hell she ain’t gonna cry.  
   
“I’m fine, James,” she says, even though he didn’t say anything.  
   
“Yeah,” he says, because even though she looks just about as fine as he feels, he knows it’s what she needs to hear. “Yeah. I know.”  
   
He reaches out to put a hand on her shoulder, and he feels something in his arm pull and, damn, it really fucking hurts. “Shit,” he mutters, and he can just see some blood seeping through his shirt. The aspirin’s wearing off and he wishes he’d have gone to the hospital so they could have given him something stronger.  
   
“Jesus, James,” Juliet says when she sees the blood. “Here.”  
   
She reaches over and helps him take off his shirt and even though the bandage is practically soaked through with blood, it’s not too bad. One of the butterfly stitches the EMTs put on has pulled loose, so he waits on the couch while Juliet goes to get a something to help fix him up.  
   
When she comes back out, she’s holding a giant first aid kit. She takes out some fresh gauze and alcohol-soaked pads and even new butterfly stitches. She seems to know what she’s doing, disinfecting the wound and then working to bandage it up.  
   
“You sure seem to like playin’ doctor,” he says with a smirk. She smiles at him and rolls her eyes a little. Her hands are cold against his arm, but it feels nice for some reason and, for the first time since everything happened, he feels a little better.  
   
She cleans him up and gently wraps his arm in gauze and when she’s done, she’s got blood all over her hands again and she’s not smiling any more.  
   
“Juliet,” he says because he doesn’t know what else to say.  
   
“James,” she says quietly. “Don’t.”  
   
Then, before he really registers what’s going on, she’s kissing him, sliding her tongue into his mouth and biting down on his lip. And he knows this is a mistake because she’s his partner and this kind of thing never ends well, but he just kisses her back, running his tongue along her bottom lip and she tastes kind of like the beer he’s been drinking all night, but sweeter somehow, and he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to stop.  
   
She moves so that she’s kind of kneeling over him and they’re still kissing, just kissing, and it feels like a memory, like the whisper of something that they’ve done hundreds of times before, even if he knows that ain’t right. But, still. It’s just so goddamn familiar somehow.  
   
He’s being real gentle with her and he can’t even remember the last time he kissed someone like this, like it’s the only thing that matters, like it’s something he needs to be doing, like it’s breathing.  
   
After a while, after he’s pushed her shirt over her head, after he’s tasted the skin on her neck, on her chest, she leads him back to her bedroom and when he slides inside of her, when he’s moving over her, staring down into her clear blue eyes, when she gasps his name and shudders around him, it all feels so achingly familiar, he could swear that this has all happened before.  
   
   
**  
   
   
When he wakes up, there’s late morning sunlight streaming through the curtains and Juliet’s pressed up against his back, her arm draped across his body. His head feels kind of fuzzy and for a few seconds he feels a little panicked, like he’s made a huge mistake. Juliet is warm and solid against him and she’s his partner, for Christ’s sake.  
   
But then his cell phone buzzes and he snaps out of it, comes more fully awake. He sits up and Juliet buries her head under her pillow as he reaches over her to answer it.  
   
“Yeah,” he says into the phone, rubbing his face a little. It’s his captain, reminding him about the IAB meeting that’s he supposed to be at in, shit. Less than an hour. Son of a bitch, he thinks, and Juliet’s still asleep beside him.  
   
“Yeah,” he says again and stumbles out of the bed. “I’m on my way.”  
   
He’s pulling on his jeans when Juliet sits up and looks at him, blinking against the sunlight.  
   
“James,” she says, her voice thick with sleep. “What’s going on?”  
   
“IAB,” he says and just then her phone buzzes, too. “Come on, Blondie, we’re gonna be late.”  
   
   
**  
   
   
James gets dressed in record time and leaves while Juliet’s still in the shower. It’ll be best if they don’t show up together anyway, so he just yells through the bathroom door that he’ll meet up with her at the station, and then races down the stairs to his car.  
   
   
**  
   
   
He’s halfway across the squad room when he realizes he’s not going to see Juliet before her interview. They didn’t have time talk about last night. He hopes like hell that she doesn’t say anything in front of IAB. There’s no faster ticket to partner reassignment than the brass finding out you’re sleeping together.  
   
The thought makes him feel kind of sick to his stomach.  
   
   
**  
   
   
His part of the interview goes fine, and then it’s Juliet’s turn. He gives her what he hopes is a reassuring smile as she walks into the interrogation room and she gives him a blank look in return.  
   
The door clicks closed, and he sits down at his desk and waits for her to come back out.  
   
   
**  
   
   
An hour later, the door to the interrogation room opens and Juliet walks out, her face blank as always. She comes over and sits at her desk, watching with him as the IAB guys head for the elevators.  
   
“Everything go okay in there?” he asks.  
   
“Yeah,” she says. “Fine.”  
   
“You didn’t say nothin’ about last night, right?” he says, and he can tell that she’s kind of hurt by that, even if her expression doesn’t change.  
   
“No, James,” she sighs and stares down at the top of her desk, arranging all of her pens in a neat line. “I didn’t.”  
   
“Cause if you did, they ain’t gonna let us be partners anymore,” he says quickly, because he knows she’s getting the wrong idea. That she thinks he regrets it, when that’s pretty much as far from the truth as you could get.  
   
“Oh,” she says, kind of surprised. She smiles at him, biting her lip a little, and he thinks about how she looked last night when she came. “Don’t worry about it. I was very discreet.”  
   
He smiles back at her and they probably look like a couple of idiots, grinning at each other across the squad room. Still, though. It’s like he can’t help himself.   
   
“You want to get some coffee?” she asks.  
   
“Sure thing, Blondie,” he says, grabbing his coat off his chair. “As long as you’re buyin’.”  
   
She laughs softly and they walk down the hall together, their arms brushing against each other as they get on the elevator. When the doors slide closed, she leans into him and he smiles at her, presses a kiss against the side of her mouth.  
   
   
**  
   
   
end  
 


End file.
